The men have brought fish up from the Thames to Billingsgate market. Magnus
Martyr, near which Eliot then worked in Lloyd’s Bank, is a Wren church in the City
of London. After the war, it was proposed that nineteen of them should be demol-
ished as redundant. St Magnus Martyr is dedicated to a hero who preferred to be
killed rather than to shed blood. It has Ionic columns, which Eliot varies to evoke the
Ionian Sea. ‘Martyr’ and ‘Ionian’ contribute inexplicable qualities. Words, said Eliot,
have ‘tentacular roots ... reaching down to our deepest fears and desires’.
It is easier to write about The Waste Land’s themes than its words, images,
rhythms and sounds. Yet Eliot’s favourite line in the poem was ‘drip drop drip drop
drop drop drop’. He insisted that ‘a poem has to be experienced before it is under-
stood’. His is a poem of images placed side by side, a multiplex version of an Imagist
poem such as Pound’s ‘Fan-Piece’ (see p. 349). The ending is prefaced by ‘fragments’
used to shore up the speaker’s tottering mind. Fragments had been potentially
sublime since ‘Ossian’, but less romantic fragments had recently been in the air.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal.
This is from the last part, ‘What the Thunder Said’, where, as Eliot says in the Notes
he supplied for the poem, ‘three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the
approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston’s book), and the present decay of
eastern Europe’. (Emmaus is the place to which disciples walked after the
Crucifixion; Jessie L. Weston’s book is From Ritual to Romance; and the ‘present
decay’ is the break-up of Austria-Hungary.) Themes are ‘employed’, as in music. The
‘maternal lamentation’ in Vienna and London mingles with that of the women of352 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55
T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1887–1965), an early
studio portrait. This was the man whom Arthur Waugh
compared to ‘a drunken Helot’ (see p. 364). Hulton
Archive/Getty Images.